Dr. Janan Bilbily – Milner Health Centre in Scarborough, ON

The Situation
Dr. Bilbily is a family physician who practiced in several clinics in the Greater Toronto area prior to establishing the Milner Health Centre in Scarborough, Ontario. Milner Health Centre opened in 2003 and serves as a family practice and a walk-in clinic. The clinic’s two full-time and two part-time family physicians manage more than 7,000 patients in their family practice and have seen over 40,000 walk-in patients to date.

Dr. Bilbily and team believe that patient health care comes first and the success of the clinic proves their commitment to this patient centered philosophy.

The Challenge
Setting up a new clinic is always a challenging task. In the planning stage, Dr. Bilbily decided that having an EMR in the clinic would help the clinic’s team to provide the best possible health care for their patients. Furthermore, an EMR that was fully integrated with practice management software would be ideal for streamlining the clinical and business aspects of the clinic and for effortless sharing of vital information between team members in a very busy environment.

When selecting a fully integrated practice management and EMR software for his new clinic, Dr. Bilbily was looking for reliable software from a company that had longevity in the marketplace. Since he wanted an EMR in place when the clinic opened, Dr. Bilbily started looking 6 months in advance and took the time to look at several different software solutions. He also spoke to several colleagues and found that they were using ABELMed for practice management (billing and scheduling) and were highly satisfied with the software and ABEL’s support services.

The Solution
After considering the features and benefits of various systems, Dr. Bilbily relied on his own experience (he had used ABELMed in several clinics where he had practiced in the past) and on the advice of his trusted colleagues and was confident that ABELMed was the right system for his clinic. Important deciding factors were ABELMed’s ease of use and competitive price, and the fact that ABEL is a solid company with a proven track record for providing physicians with state-of-the-art solutions.

ABELMed is helping the team at Milner Health Centre put patient health care first in many practical ways. Electronic records are more organized and efficient - streamlining practice workflows and providing quick, easy access to patient charts. For example, Dr. Bilbily finds that receiving lab results electronically is far more efficient than receiving them on paper because results come in faster and it is easier to review trends. He stated that, “Any abnormal results are flagged; we can call our patients almost immediately after receiving this result. Our patients appreciate that high level of care.” Another example is ABELMed’s ability to generate automated alerts when patients are due for their health maintenance procedures e.g. Pap smear, mammogram, etc. These alerts assist the clinic’s staff to get patients scheduled for their tests on a timely basis and deliver high level of preventive care. Finally, Dr. Bilbily has received many positive comments from specialists about the referral request letters that he sends. ABELMed generates customized referral letters in minutes helping to streamline the referral process and saving the clinic time and money. Dr. Bilbily stated that, “Specialists have remarked that the letters are easy to read, comprehensive and provide all the necessary clinical information.” These examples illustrate just some of ways that the practice and their patients benefit from ABELMed’s powerful features.

The Relationship
Dr. Bilbily taught himself and the other physicians at the clinic to use the ABELMed program by using the ABELMed User’s Guide. The clinic’s entire team found ABELMed easy to learn and use and only required a few hours of training from ABEL staff to become proficient at using the comprehensive features.

Today, Milner Health Centre has a special relationship with ABEL and has agreed to be a Beta site for ABELMed. The clinic regularly implements and tests new features and functionality into their workflow and provides valuable feedback to ABEL to guide in future development.

The Result
Since using ABELMed EMR, Dr. Bilbily finds that he can use his time more efficiently, spending more time with patients and less time on administration. A highly satisfied ABEL customer, Dr. Bilbily states, “If there is ever a question or we need some assistance everyone at ABEL is always extremely helpful.”

The end result is that the team at Milner Health Centre is well equipped to put their belief that patient health care comes first into practice.